Robert James Shiller

Shiller, Robert James, 1946–, American economist, b. Detroit, grad. Univ. of Michigan (B.A., 1967), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (S.M., 1968; Ph.D., 1972). A professor at Yale since 1982, Shiller is an influential advocate of "behavioral finance," which appropriates principles and insights found in other academic fields, particularly psychology, and applies them to economics. He has also worked in such areas as financial markets, macroeconomics, statistics, and real estate. In 2013 he shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Eugene F. Fama and Lars Peter Hansen for work they separately did in the empirical analyis of asset prices. Shiller showed, beginning with a 1981 study of the relationship between stock prices and dividends, that despite short-term volatility returns on stocks follow a predictable pattern over the long term. In the early 1990s he and fellow economist Karl Case developed the Case-Shiller home price indexes. In his prescient, best-selling Irrational Exhuberance (2000), Shiller examined the 1980s–90s market boom and dot-com bust and, in its 2005 updated edition, the housing bubble, explaining the factors that led to the huge overvaluation and precipitous decline in the markets. His other books include Market Volatility (1989), New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century (2003), Subprime Solution: How Today's Global Financial Crisis Happened and What to Do about It (2008), Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism (with G. A. Akerlof, 2009), and Finance and the Good Society (2012).